250 Years of Theater History

 

[On 16 July 2026, I posted “250 Years of Dressing for the American Dream” by Vanessa Friedman (under the headline “Dressing for the American Dream”).  That was about fashion, with an unstated theater connection to costume.  Now I’m posting another semiquincentennial article, this one with an unquestionable theater connection—it’s about theater history!

[Maybe five pages—that’s how long the article was in print—isn’t anywhere near sufficient space to cover a quarter of a millennium of theater in America, but there was enough coverage to introduce to me some pretty interesting things I didn’t know or hadn’t considered.  See if you agree.] 

“WE THE (THEATRE) PEOPLE”
by Charlotte M. Canning 

[This article was published in American Theatre 42.4 (Summer 2026 – “Theatre History”) on 30 June 2026. Under the same headline, it’s posted on the website of the Theatre Communications Group at AMERICAN THEATRE | We the (Theatre) People.]

The history of live performance on this continent has been about art, commerce, innovation, stereotyping, and the breaking of stereotypes—i.e., messy democracy in action.

John Adams [1735-1826; a Founding Father of the Unites State and the second President of the United States: 1797-1801] once predicted [in a letter to his wife on 3 July 1776] that July 4, the date of the vote ratifying the Declaration of Independence, would be “celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary festival . . . with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this continent to the other.”

[In the quotation above, Adams was, however, referring to 2 July, the day the Continental Congress actually officially voted to sever ties with Great Britain, making the colonies independent states—rather than 4 July, when Congress formally adopted the wording of the Declaration of Independence, drafted to explain their decision to the world. Adams believed, erroneously, as it turned out, that 3 July would forever be marked as America's true birthday.]

Adams had little interest in theatre at the time, but he understood that live performance [i.e., “Shews”] is bound to democracy as a civic space of convening, public discourse, and collective engagement. Just over 50 years later, a visiting Frenchman would affirm Adams’s sense that democracy and theatre are bound up with one another. “When a revolution that has changed the social and political state of an aristocratic people begins to affect literature, it generally manifests itself first in the drama and remains conspicuous there,” politician and historian Alexis de Tocqueville [1805-59; French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian] argued in Democracy in America [De la démocratie en Amérique; two volumes: Librairie de Charles Gosselin, 1835 and 1840]. The book is still read today for its prescient insights into and understanding of the United States, and its passing observations on U.S. theatre offer a tidy summary of why and how it persists in the 21st century.

[The two volumes of de Tocqueville’s study were first published in English by London’s Saunders and Otley (translated by English political writer and jurist Henry Reeve [1813-95]) in 1835 and 1840, later the same years as the original editions. The first U.S. editions, the Reeve translations with an original preface especially for American readers, were released in 1838 and 1840. They were published by Adlard & Saunders, a newly established U.S. branch of the British publishers, in partnership with George Dearborn & Co. of New York City. There are, of course, many more recent republications, both in French and English.]

In de Tocqueville’s nine months of travel around the nation in the company of magistrate Gustave de Beaumont [1802-1866; French magistrate and prison reformer]—an itinerary which spanned Boston, upstate New York, Quebec, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Memphis, among other places—it is certain that the two men attended the theatre in Philadelphia, New York City, and New Orleans, though there may have been other visits that they did not document. What would de Tocqueville and de Beaumont have seen on American stages in the early 19th century? In Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, they would have seen theatre produced by managers Noah Ludlow [1795-1886; actor and manager of a theater company touring Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi] and Sol Smith [1801-69; actor and theater manager in St. Louis], whose partnership exemplified one way theatre operated up through the mid-19th century. From the 1830s through the ’50s, Smith and Ludlow commanded the theatre scene in the South and Midwest. They not only controlled acting companies and repertoire; they also built, ran, and owned influential theatres, most significantly the St. Louis Theatre [1837-51; first theater in St. Louis; first real theater west of the Mississippi] and the St. Charles Theatre in New Orleans [1835-1967; first English theater in New Orleans]. Their acting companies were itinerant, stopping in smaller towns to perform while traveling to and from Smith and Ludlow’s larger theatres.

Indeed, theatre in the U.S. has always been about travel and movement. Large companies known for their impressive quality and stars with name recognition were no less itinerant than small groups who hustled from small town to small town trying to make a living. With itinerancy, though, came suspicion. In Mark Twain’s famous novel, Huckleberry Finn encounters two fraudsters [the Duke and the King in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chatto & Windus [U.K.], 1884; Charles L. Webster And Company [U.S.], 1885)] on the Mississippi who offer a “Shaksperean [sic] Revival ! ! ! Wonderful Attraction!” with the “world-renowned tragedians, David Garrick the Younger [1716-79] of Drury Lane Theatre London, and Edmund Kean [1787-1833] the elder, of the Royal Haymarket Theatre.” These may have been fictionalized parodies, but their struggle and desperation would have been instantly recognizable to any 19th-century jobbing actor. Harry Watkins [1825-94; actor, diarist, playwright, and theater manager], whose career spanned the 1840s to the late ’80s, never impersonated a fake British star (he did claim to perform “in imitation of the celebrated Lucius Junius Brutus Booth”), though he knew his Shakespeare well. But his plight was often no better than Huck Finn’s companions. Of an 1845 stint in Galveston, Watkins rejoiced that one show had done well enough that he could afford both shoes and food. “I had nothing on my feet before, and now I have a good pair of boots, and enough money left to buy something to eat with and that is a good deal in Texas,” he wrote in his diary.

[Lucius Junius Brutus Booth, better known as Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852), was an English-born American theatrical tragedian, one of the most prominent actors of the 19th-century American stage. He was the father of 12 children, including Edwin Booth (1833-93), widely regarded as one of the greatest American tragic actors of the 19th century and the first American-born actor to achieve an international reputation; Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. (1821-83), an actor and theater manager; and John Wilkes Booth (1838-65), the actor who infamously assassinated President Abraham Lincoln (b. 1809; 16th President of the United States: 1861-65) at Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865.

[Curious fact: Gail Merrifield Papp (b. ca. 1935), widow (and partner) of New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater founder Joseph Papp (1921-91), whom she married in 1976, is the great-great-granddaughter of John Wilkes Booth. Though Booth never married, he had a secret, long-term, out-of-wedlock affair that in 1859 produced a daughter, Gail Papp’s great-grandmother.  The Booth family never acknowledged the relationship, but private family records and contemporaneous letters confirm it.  (The descent passed through the female line, so the surname changed with each generation until Gail Papp’s grandmother, Booth’s granddaughter, married a man named Merrifield in 1899.)]

Though the two Frenchmen were unimpressed with the quality of what they saw (“The theatres are bad,” de Beaumont bluntly observed), the important thing to note is the connection de Tocqueville posited between democracy and theatre. “Most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind, but the keen emotions of the heart,” de Tocqueville argued. Audiences in democracies like to see onstage “that medley of conditions, of feelings, and of opinions, which occurs before their eyes. Theatre becomes more striking, more vulgar, and more true.”

If de Tocqueville and de Beaumont were looking for the most meaningful theatre on the continent, they may have been looking in the wrong place, and with the wrong measuring tools. Theatre in the U.S. was not a proper literary endeavor until well into the 20th century. Instead, theatre as it emerged in what became the United States, and was practiced up through the end of the 19th century, was not about inventing a new literary canon but about innovation in performance itself. As theatre historian Constance Rourke [1885-1941; author and educator; known for shaping the fields of American studies, American literature, and American folklore] has argued, Americans “emerged as the theatrical race,” defining “theatrical” in opposition to “the dramatic” and characterizing it as “full of experiment . . . closely interwoven with the American character and the American experience” [American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931)]. Rourke went on to argue that some of the earliest performance innovations in North America happened during encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Americans. She found evidence for the claim in treaties as early as 1677.

“These treaties were essentially plays,” Rourke wrote, “recording what was said in the parleys, including bits of action, the exchanges of gift, of wampum, the smoking of pipes, the many ceremonial dances, cries, and choral songs. Even the printed form of the treaties was dramatic: The participants were listed like a cast of characters, and precise notations were made as to ceremonial action” [The Roots of American Culture (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1942)].

Rourke and subsequent theatre historians also recognized the primary, and problematic, invention that North American theatre contributed to global entertainment: blackface minstrelsy. The practice emerged in the early 1830s as a white performance form presented as a representation of Black life. Comic actor Thomas Dartmouth Rice [1808-60; performer and playwright] claimed to be mimicking a Black man he had seen in the street when he performed “Jump Jim Crow” [song and dance from 1828 that Rice performed in blackface all over the U.S.] but his appropriation, distortion, and exploitation owed far less to accurate research than to the white racist imaginary. The first minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface (often burnt cork; eventually makeup companies offered specialized products), though by the mid- to late 19th century Black performers found that their access to professional performance often depended on their willingness to “black up” for minstrel shows.

[Minstrelsy (or minstrel shows) was a 19th-century American theatrical entertainment where white performers wore blackface makeup to act out demeaning, racist caricatures of African Americans, establishing harmful stereotypes of Black people as lazy, dimwitted, and buffoonish.

[Originating in the 1830s in New York, minstrelsy became the most popular form of public entertainment in the country by 1848. Minstrel shows emerged as brief burlesques and comic entr’actes in the early 1830s in the Northeastern states. They were developed into full-fledged art form in the next decade.

[Shows typically featured a mix of comedy skits, musical numbers (such as early ragtime), and variety acts. It laid the foundation for vaudeville (early 1870s-early 1930s) and modern American musical theater. Its legacy of stereotypes heavily influenced early 20th-century radio, television, and film.]

While de Tocqueville and de Beaumont did not comment on minstrelsy, they did notice that racism was no less part of the theatre than the nation at large. As de Beaumont later reflected, “The first time I attended a theatre in the United States, I was surprised by the care with which white spectators were distinguished from Black audiences.” He used this practice in his 1835 novel Marie, or Slavery in the United States [Stanford University Press, 1958 (first English edition); Marie; ou, L'esclavage aux États-Unis (Libraire de Charles Gosselin, 1835)] to illustrate the ferocious violence Black people experienced under white supremacy.

Across the 19th century, theatre was where American national identity was rehearsed and produced, often self-consciously: In 1828, actor Edwin Forrest [1806-72; American Shakespearean actor] offered a prize for a new play in which “the hero shall be an aboriginal of this country.” While Forrest was primarily looking for a starring vehicle for himself, he also earnestly wanted to develop U.S. dramatic literature. Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoag [debuted, 1829 in New York City], by John Augustus Stone [1801-34; American actor, dramatist, and playwright] became a staple in Forrest’s repertoire, and inspired a character that resonates to the current day, that of the “vanishing Indian.” Theatre historian Bethany Hughes [Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma; DOB unknown] has noted that so-called “Indian plays” like Metamora typically depict “noble savages dying to make way for virile young Americans” [Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (NYU Press, 2024)]. Like minstrelsy’s racist depiction of Black people, these Native American stereotypes have persisted into the 21st century.

Plays by Shakespeare [1564-1616]—whom Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82; essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet] described as “the father of the man in America,” despite his being English—were also a staple of the emerging American identity. De Tocqueville remarked “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found.” Audiences were even willing to resort to violence to assert American ownership of the Shakespearean tradition. Forrest, for one, had a long-established rivalry with British actor William Charles Macready [1793-1873], which came to a head in 1849, when Macready dared perform Macbeth the same night as Forrest and only a few blocks away in New York. A fierce riot broke out, leaving dozens dead and more than 120 injured. The Astor Place Riot, named for the theatre where Macready was performing, was fueled more by class identity and anti-British hatred than fandom per se. Nevertheless, the riot demonstrates how integral theatre was to life in the U.S.

[The Astor Place Riot, which left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured, broke out on 10 May 1849. It wasn’t named for “the theatre where Macready was performing,” the Astor Place Opera House (often commonly referred to as the Astor Opera House), I maintain, but the area around the theater that was known by New Yorkers simply as Astor Place. (The theater in which Forrest was playing, the Broadway Theatre, was about a mile further downtown in the area now known as TriBeCa.  Neither theater building exists today.)

[The violent clash between the fans of rival actors began at the Astor Place Opera House, the actual riot—which involved a crowd of over 10,000 people, brick-throwing, and the calling in of the state militia—predominantly played out across the entire multi-block neighborhood pocket. The riot was named for the location where the event occurred, a section of the East Village bounded by East 4th Street on the south, Broadway on the west, East 8th Street on the north, and Third Avenue on the east.]

In the post-Civil War years, American theatre also grew into a big business, and no business was bigger than vaudeville. From the 1880s to the 1930s, vaudeville circuits criss-crossed the nation. No matter `available. Vaudeville, a descendant of variety theatre, concert saloons, minstrelsy, burlesque, circuses, and medicine shows, among other popular forms, in turn shows its influence on entertainment today, from standup comedy to late-night TV to musical theatre.

[Vaudeville (early 1870s-early 1930s) was a variety entertainment consisting of short acts such as acrobatic turns, song-and-dance routines, animal acts, and so on, popular especially in the early 20th century. American vaudeville was essentially a parallel version of British music hall; though they arose independently, they shared the same core format. Furthermore, turn-of-the-20th-century vaudeville served as the direct structural and stylistic model for early television variety shows. Early TV stars like Milton Berle (1908-2002), Bob Hope (1903-2003), and Jack Benny (1894-1974) got their professional start directly on vaudeville circuits.]

Crucially, vaudeville distinguished itself from some of its disreputable predecessors thanks to the influential impresario Tony Pastor [1837-1908; impresario, variety performer, and theater owner; sometimes referred to as the “Dean of Vaudeville”], who prohibited the sale of alcohol and proscribed risqué or salacious content. This allowed him to offer “family-friendly” fare and to expand audiences to include middle-class spectators, especially women, who had shunned or been excluded from earlier diversions. At its peak vaudeville encompassed everyone from ill-paid small-time hacks in slapdash shows to big-time operators with national names performing the highest-quality work in state-of-the-art theatres.

The capital of the big-time circuit was unquestionably New York’s Palace Theater [sic], built in 1913 by manager-producer Martin Beck [1868-1940] of the Orpheum Circuit, which was operated by producer-manager B. F. Keith [1846-1914]. Keith founded the United Booking Office of America. That eventually merged with Beck’s company, further consolidating their power. This merger was typical of this period, following the recurring trend toward monopolies, and not only in vaudeville. One of the earliest and most successful of such empires was the Theatrical Syndicate, run primarily by Charles Frohman [1856-1915], Abraham Lincoln Erlanger [1859-1930], and Marcus Alonzo Klaw [1858-1936] from 1888 to 1919. This triumvirate controlled booking in most theatres, as well as the careers of many actors. Their domination was eventually successfully challenged by the Shubert brothers [Lee Shubert (1871-1953), Sam S. Shubert (1878-1905); Jacob J. Shubert (1879-1963)], and the Syndicate’s influence waned after 1910. As the Shuberts’ actions demonstrated, no control is so absolute that it cannot be challenged (today the Shubert Organization [incorporated, 1904] owns nearly half of Broadway theatres [as of 2024, 17 Broadway theaters]).

De Tocqueville once wrote that “the pit has often imposed its law on the boxes”—i.e., in the popular arts, ordinary people will not be dictated to by the elite if elite taste contradicts their needs and desires. This popular pushback might show up not only in theatre’s content but also in its practices, including racial segregation. In the 1920s, Sherman H. Dudley [1872-1940] founded the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), which established a circuit to provide Black performers with long-term contracts. Dudley also bought or leased theatres in the South and Midwest to ensure greater access for Black entertainers.

By far the most important issue being wrestled with on U.S. stages was the question of who belongs here and why. For their part, Indigenous people used theatre in multiple ways to provide their answer, and to resist their erasure from the national narrative. Activist and artist Zitkála-Šá [1876-1938; writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist] (Yankton Dakota Sioux, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) wrote the libretto for The Sun Dance (1913) in collaboration with composer William F. Hanson [1887-1969; composer and music teacher; specialized in Native American music]. Her goal was to merge Ute stories and experiences with Western art to create serious work from the Indigenous perspective; the opera debuted in Utah that year and was performed on Broadway in 1938.

[Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird) was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in Dakota Territory (now South Dakota). At 8-years-old, Quaker missionaries recruited her for the White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a boarding school in Wabash, Indiana [775 miles east of the reservation]. There she was given the missionary name Gertrude Simmons.

[Though she found great joy in learning to read, write, and play the piano and violin, she experienced great grief and pain in losing her heritage by the forced assimilation and the cutting of her hair. After returning to the Yankton Reservation in 1887 over a school break, she felt that she no longer belonged there after her time at the institute, so she returned to the institute to further her education. She later learned that the government paid the schools for every child successfully removed from reservations, realizing that the schools were created for cultural erasure.

[Zitkála-Šá began writing and producing works that portrayed Lakota people as generous and loving, actively fighting stereotypes in the mainstream that were used in arguments supporting assimilation. Working on the Yankton Reservation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she met Captain Raymond Bonnin (1880-1942), a Yankton Dakota; they married in 1902. For the next fourteen years (1902-1916), they were assigned to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Vernal, Utah.

[From 1897 to 1898, Zitkala-Ša studied and played the violin at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In 1910, she met Hanson, a professor of music at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Hanson and Zitkála-Šá worked on the Sun Dance Opera for the next three years. She wrote the libretto and the songs for the story, while Hanson wrote the score. The songs were based on the sacred ritual that was federally outlawed from 1904 to 1978. By folding the sacred ritual into a Western operatic structure, the librettist legally bypassed federal restrictions and preserved her culture.

[Zitkála-Šá died on 26 January 1938. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Viginia, with her husband, who died on 24 September 1942.

[The Sun Dance Opera premiered for three nights in February 1913 at Orpheus Hall on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. It was performed by members of the Ute Nation who lived on the reservation. The opera was performed several more times at BYU, including twice in 1914 and once in 1935. The Broadway début was on 27 April 1938 (three months after the librettist’s death) at the Broadway Theatre, where it was put on by the New York City Light Opera. Reviews were universally bad and a planned second performance was cancelled.

[Hanson received all public credit for the opera, with no mention of Zitkála-Šá, which he’d also done in 1935 at BYU. She wasn’t involved in the production, nor in the revisions made to her libretto and Hanson’s composition which doubled the show’s length. He added a number of songs and rewrote those remaining from the original text.]

Other notable Native artists of this period include popular vaudevillians Mary Nelson Archambaud (Penobscot), a.k.a., Molly Spotted Elk [1903-77; Native American dancer, actress, and writer], and Princess White Elk (Yurok, born Bertha Thompson [1886-c. 1924; performer, model, and activist]). Writer-performer Will Rogers [1879-1935; vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator] and playwright Lynn Riggs [1899-1954; author, poet, playwright and screenwriter; his 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs adapted into the 1943 musical Oklahoma!] were Cherokee Oklahomans with influence in multiple entertainment venues, including vaudeville, Little Theatre (a sort of precursor to regional theatre as we know it), Broadway, and Hollywood.

Immigrants also employed theatre to claim space in their new country. On the vaudeville stage, actors Joe Weber [1867-1942] and Lew Fields [1867-1941], both children of Jewish Eastern European immigrants, formed a double act [Weber and Fields; first stage appearance: 1876; formed vaudeville company: 1885; Broadway debut: 1893; partnership dissolved: 1904] as two bumbling German immigrants trying to make it big in the U.S. Immigrants from one part of the world performing as those from another was a popular approach: Chinese American Lee Tung Foo [1875-1966] performed in multiple languages, sang popular and classical songs, and caricatured recent immigrants, including the Irish, Scottish, and Chinese. Diverse playwrights, including María Ruiz de Burton [1832-95; first female Mexican-American writer published in English], Israel Zangwill [British; 1864-1926], Li Ling-Ai (Gladys Li) [1908-2003], [1906-63], and Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953] all wrote movingly about their immigrant and first-generation experiences.

[The immigrant on the list is:

·   Ruiz de Burton, who was born in Baja California in 1832, before the Mexican-American War. After the war, but before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Ruiz de Burton moved to Monterey in Alta California, which would become U.S. territory pursuant to the treaty. (Part of it would become the State of California in 1850.) Unlike the stereotypical immigrant, Ruiz de Burton became a U.S. citizen automatically by virtue of her residency in a territory acquired by the United States.  

[The first-gen writers are:

·   Zangwill was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—but immigrants to Britain. He wrote about that experience in works such as the novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (William Heinemann (London); Jewish Publication Society of America (Philadelphia), 1892; dramatized for Broadway in 1899 and filmed in 1915), but in 1908, he wrote The Melting Pot that was a hit in Broadway (6 September 1909-1 January 1910; Comedy Theatre). The play gave us the very phrase that defines the American immigrant experience.

·   Li, a writer, dancer, playwright, and film producer, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Both her parents were Chinese immigrants. Before the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), Li returned to China to study Chinese music and directing theater productions at the Beijing Institute of Fine Arts. Because of the war. She returned to Honolulu ib 1937, where she conceived the project that would become Kukan (1941), a harrowing documentary exposing the atrocities of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It became the first feature-length documentary to win an Academy Award. In 1972, she published Life is for a Long Time: A Chinese Hawaiian Memoir, which detailed her parents’ medical careers and first-generation life in Hawaii. While a student at the University of Hawaii in the 1920s, she studied playwriting, and in 1924, she composed The Submission of Rose Moy (produced 1928), her most famous work was the very first play written and published by an Asian American woman. The play’s a melodrama detailing intergenerational conflict, assimilation, and the clash between Western freedom and traditional Chinese immigrant customs.

·   Odets became the Group Theatre’s signature playwright with the debuts of Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Awake and Sing! (written, 1933; produced, 1935) and his reputation is inextricably connected with the Group. Odets was the son of Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and the characters in Awake and Sing! are a working-class immigrant Jewish family living in a crowded Bronx apartment during the Great Depression. The narrative centers on the struggle between the older generation’s traditional dreams and the younger, American-born generation’s search for identity, dignity, and economic stability [see “Awake and Sing!, et al.” (3 April 2017)].

·   O’Neill is the sole American who’s a Nobel laureate playwright and the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill (1847-1920) and Mary Ellen Quinlan O’Neill (1857-1922), who was also of Irish descent. He became involved with the Provincetown Players in mid-1916 and the Players performed many of his early works in their theaters both in Massachusetts and in Greenwich Village, New York City. Long Day’s Journey into Night is widely regarded as his magnum opus and one of the great American plays of the 20th century. It was written in 1939-41 and first published posthumously in 1956. The play portrays a family, the members of which are the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill, his older brother, and their parents, struggling to grapple with the realities and consequences of each member's failings. (A Moon for the Misbegotten, written in 1943 and premiered on Broadway in 1957, is a sequel to Long Day’s Journey.)]

Much American theatre bloomed well outside the mainstream of national life. Indeed, for centuries theatrical works in what would become the U.S. were performed in Spanish, as theatre was first used to colonize and convert Indigenous people to Christianity as early as 1568. In the 18th century, Spanish settlers wrote plays and performed them in Alta California and Louisiana, well before the first purpose-built theatre was built by the British in their North American colonies in 1716, and before even the arrival in 1752 of Lewis Hallam’s [British; ca. 1714-56] English theatre company.

Well into the 19th century and the 20th, theatre in languages other than English dominated the stage. German-language theatre could be found in the Midwest and West, especially Wisconsin and Texas; Chinese theatre was a staple of entertainment in San Francisco and across the U.S. from the 1850s on. Yiddish theatre would be ubiquitous in New York—from 1890 to 1940 there were 200 Yiddish theatres in the U.S., most in New York City [see “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene” (23 August and 26 August 2012]—and would go on to birth a generation of artists, including Stella [1901-92; actor and acting teacher] and Luther Adler [1903-84; actor], Harold Clurman [1901-80; director], and Lee Strasberg [1901-82; director and acting teacher], who would revolutionize theatre practices in the U.S.

Up through the mid-20th century, the most robust theatre circuits with the largest audiences were Spanish-language ones. They ranged from small family companies like the Compañía Hernández Villalongín, which performed on either side of the U.S.-Mexican border, to large-scale commercial businesses, with San Antonio and Los Angeles as major hubs. In the 1920s, Los Angeles easily supported over 20 theatres that changed their bills daily. Circuses and tent shows blanketed the Southwest, especially after the 1910s, when the violence of the Mexican Revolution [1910-20] drove many artists to settle more permanently in the U.S. Up through the 1940s, artists from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico would frequently rent and fill Broadway houses.

In the early 20th century, a division began to emerge between theatre as a crowd-pleasing business and as a challenging art form. Broadway was not yet the nexus of commercial theatre that it would become after World War II, but it did reflect the emphasis on profit and popular appeal that was becoming increasingly distasteful to theatre artists who saw themselves as serious art makers.

Meanwhile, theatre was being taken up as a legitimate academic subject, with universities as diverse as Brown, Yale, Case Western Reserve, and Howard establishing theatre departments. The Little Theatre Movement encouraged the proliferation of theatre outside of commercial structures, with director Helen Spaulding declaring Chicago’s Skyloft Players in 1942 a “theatre OF the people FOR the people BY the people.” Alexis de Tocqueville would certainly have approved.

The American theatre as we know it today, though it contains traces of and owes large debts to all this history, was largely built since the 1950s and ’60s, fueled by the nonprofit funding model, the Ford Foundation, and the early support of the National Endowment for the Arts. All those pillars are in question today. Indeed, now is a perilous moment to be arguing for a telling of history that encompasses our nation’s extraordinary diversity. Not long after being inaugurated for this second term, President Trump [b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; 47th President: 2025-2029] issued the executive order [#14253, 27 March 2025] “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which sought to prohibit any telling of the national story that seeks to “undermine remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

If it is true, as de Tocqueville put it in 1835, that “no part of literature is more closely or more abundantly linked to the present state of society than the theatre,” then we should be able to look to our nation’s stages, as we always have, for signs of where our country has been—and where it is going.

[Charlotte M. Canning is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor in Drama at the University of Texas at Austin and a recipient of the University of Texas Systems Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.  She’s also director of UT-Austin’s Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism and has served as president of the American Society for Theatre Research.

[Canning has won the 2016 Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theater for On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History for The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (University of Iowa Press, 2005).  She’s also the co-editor, with Tom Postlewait, of Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (University of Iowa Press, 2010). 

[Besides AT, her writing has been seen in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Truthout, and her op-eds have appeared in Time, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, The Conversation, and other publications.]